Postfeminist Stylistics, Work Femininities and Coaching: a Multimodal Study of a Website

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine representations of work femininities on a British website offering coaching specifically aimed at women. It builds on and contributes to studies of postfeminist representations but with a specific focus on work femininities and coaching webpages. Although studies on postfeminist representation have analysed the way young women's embodied and sexualized femininities are depicted across a wide variety of mainstream media, there has not been a study that focuses on the representation of work femininities on coaching websites. My approach matters because feminist authors critique popular psychology and link it to postfeminism and neoliberalism, but as yet studies have focused on self‐help books and magazines and not on newer media. Furthermore, coaching websites are an important medium for circulating postfeminist work femininities and psychological advice, produced through the digital labour of women entrepreneurs. Through my analysis of one website, influenced by feminist social semiotic multimodality literature, this article contributes to postfeminist theory and organization studies by explaining how ‘postfeminist stylistics’ reproduce postfeminist tropes and depictions of relational and individualized entrepreneurial femininities visually and textually.

Heroines of enterprise: Post-recession media representations of women and entrepreneurship in a UK newspaper 2008–2016

“…However, while Lewis suggests these alternative modes may challenge the hegemony of individualised entrepreneurial femininity, characterised as they are by often contrasting features, our findings suggest that the boundaries between these different modes are not unequivocal. The hegemonic entrepreneurial femininity revealed in our analysis, while being highly individualised and concerned with maximising growth/wealth, also contains key features of maternal and relational femininity, consistent with notions of synthetic sisterhood (Swann, 2017).…”

“…This reflects the growing centrality of work and rising importance of economic identities in constituting the self, as well as the extension of economic rationales and business logic to typically non-work areas of life and the self. Success is both individualised and internalised, with a focus on the psychic life of the individual, the role of positive affect, and the importance of aesthetic labour (Rottenberg 2014;Scharff 2016;Gill, et al, 2017;Swann 2017;Pritchard et al 2019). These are key to entrepreneurial success, achieving a successful balance between work and family life, each of which are, and indeed should be, satisfying.…”

Reconstructing Retirement as an Enterprising Endeavor

“…Elsewhere, baby boomers are damned for not working (economically unproductive) but equally damned for taking jobs at the expense of younger workers with volunteering as the only alternative (Pritchard & Whiting, 2014a). Here, enterprise was positioned as salvation for Wearies who struggle financially, naturalizing not just the precarity of the neoliberal labor market (Swan, 2017) but the economic uncertainty of individuals who are subject to its discourses. Enterprise provides independence both from the state (in the form of benefits) and from the labor market (in the form of being seen to take jobs from young workers).…”

Examining Web Images: A Combined Visual Analysis (CVA) Approach

“…As previously highlighted, there is a significant body of research that has examined pre‐existing images. Examples include the use of imagery in annual reporting (Davison, ), campaigning (Bell and Leonard, ), corporate social responsibility (Breitbarth et al ., ; Höllerer et al ., ), diversity (Swan, ), and entrepreneurship (Smith, ; Swan, ). Rather than offering a broad review here I focus on research that particularly informed my thinking about CVA.…”